By Emily Withnall

Returning from a trip once, the woman seated beside me peered out the window as the plane began its descent to Albuquerque. “Oh my,” she said. “Look at how brown it is.” I looked. I saw some brown and grey buildings, but I also saw red earth, the gentle green of the cottonwood leaves, the dark green of the juniper, and the deep blue of the Sandias—which I knew from experience would blush a luminous pink at sunset. My impulse was to defend the land, but I remained silent. Seeing through someone else’s eyes is often difficult—especially when it comes to the lands we call home.

Although I was born and raised here and feel deeply connected to this place, I cannot see it the same way as people who have been here far longer. I do not hold the ancestral knowledge or memory that comes from generations. Most people living within what we call New Mexico do not live on our ancestral homelands—including many Indigenous peoples who have lived here for time immemorial, who do not have full access, or any, to their ancestral lands. For some of us, displacement was a choice and for others, genocide, slavery, colonization, and assimilation have forced displacement.

In an excerpt from her memoir Whiskey Tender, Deborah Taffa (Kwatsaán and Laguna) writes about being a mixed-tribe kid living in a border town on the Navajo Nation. For Taffa, experiences with displacement and assimilation echoed the long history of her ancestors and parents. Watching her father draw strength and comfort in the land helped Taffa do the same.

DezBaa´ (Diné) also chronicles the history of forced removal of Native peoples here, beginning with Spanish colonization in the 1500s. People who should have been on these lands for centuries often weren’t. As she writes in her article about two Native Nations’ recent land exchanges with the New Mexico State Land Office, “For those of us who have grown up
outside of our ancestral lands, there’s a joyful remembrance in our souls and a mournful ache in our hearts.” Though their histories are not the same, Fort Sill-Chiricahua-Warm Springs Apache and Santa Ana Pueblo have recently expanded access to their ancestral lands. It is an act of reclaiming some of what was lost.

For many Indigenous communities, reclaiming and re-imagining is embedded in their history. In his article, Jim O’Donnell chronicles the rise of authoritarianism among Ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corners region and the subsequent migration away from this political system and connected economic disparities in the 1200s. Tewa Pueblos in New Mexico are among those believed to be descendants of groups who broke away from authoritarianism to create more egalitarian societies. Though O’Donnell advises readers to approach lessons of the past with caution given our contemporary lenses, there is perhaps a hopeful lesson in the history he chronicles: Agency, reclaiming, and the human imagination can help us create new lived realities.

Storytelling and art are powerful examples of imagination and our capacity to envision new systems and heal from pain. Steph Joyce writes about the 1980 prison riot at the Santa Fe Penitentiary and reveals the ways art can help incarcerated people survive. Food, too, is an art, as Mi’Jan Celie Tho-Biaz reveals in her essay about New Mexico food traditions, and it’s one that can nourish and heal us—especially when we create and enjoy it together. In her article about Yvonne Montoya’s dance performance that reckons with displacement of nuevomexicano families from the Pajarito Plateau during the construction of Los Alamos, Myrriah Gómez records Montoya’s powerful words: “We must take our historias into our own hands and instill them in our children to ensure that our querencia—our love of place and culture—lives on.”